Chaos swept California's Santa Barbara County on Tuesday after a powerful overnight storm hammered the region with heavy rains, leading to the deaths of at least six people and triggering multiple water rescues, authorities said.

Among the hardest hit places has been Montecito, a wealthy community sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean to the south and the Santa Ynez Mountains to the north, where "massive" runoff sent mud and debris slamming into homes, said Santa Barbara County Fire Department spokesman Mike Eliason.

The circumstances surrounding the deaths in Santa Barbara County were not immediately known, but were connected to the storm, local sheriff's and fire officials said.

For all its beauty and gorgeous weather, California is a tricky place in which to live. The key to its successful settlement was American technological innovation and mastery, creating a stable fresh-water supply via dams and reservoirs, drilling for oil, and clearing the brush and deadwood from around towns that otherwise could never have survived -- Los Angeles, for example. It was the muscular conquest of nature that made modern California possible; whether the lotus-eaters that currently populate the coast understand that is highly unlikely.

And not only is Google’s fact-checking highly partisan — perhaps reflecting the sentiments of its leaders — it is also blatantly wrong, asserting sites made “claims” they demonstrably never made.

When searching for a media outlet that leans right, like The Daily Caller (TheDC), Google gives users details on the sidebar, including what topics the site typically writes about, as well as a section titled “Reviewed Claims.”

Vox, and other left-wing outlets and blogs like Gizmodo, are not given the same fact-check treatment. When searching their names, a “Topics they write about” section appears, but there are no “Reviewed Claims.”

In fact, a review of mainstream outlets, as well as other outlets associated with liberal and conservative audiences, shows that only conservative sites feature the highly misleading, subjective analysis. Several conservative-leaning outlets like TheDC are “vetted,” while equally partisan sites like Vox, ThinkProgress, Slate, The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Salon, Vice and Mother Jones are spared.

Media bias takes on many forms and, given Google's ubiquity, this may be one of the more insidious yet. Google isn't just spoon feeding liberal nonsense to people, it's earth-moving it. The tendency to only check conservative sites mirrors exactly what the MSM does to Republicans in the White House. I was just thinking yesterday that I wonder what an exhaustive search of the 2009-2016 media would turn up in the way of President Obama being fact checked. Anything? President Trump can't say "Hello" without "news" outlets fact checking to see if that was, in fact, an appropriate greeting.

It is no secret that Google is a left-leaning corporate monolith, but it is also a for-profit enterprise. Maybe they're rolling the dice that people are so used to using the search engine that this kind of news won't affect them.

As someone who was a friend of Andrew Breitbart (although we had a sometimes tempestuous relationship) and also of Larry Solov (Breitbart.com CEO), it's hard to see how Larry et al had any choice but to end Steve Bannon's tenure. Further, anyone who thinks Bannon commands any kind of serious loyalty now or constitutes any kind of threat to Trump is being foolish or ginning up an imaginary conflict. That's over. My guess is Steve B. is stewing in his own juices now, filled with regret and trying to figure out how to get back in Trump's good graces. Maybe he has a chance — look at the Trump-Graham relationship now — but I tend to doubt it. Only an idiot disses a man's family — especially to an obvious sleaze bucket like Michael Wolff.

Ivanka Trump failed to acknowledge that one of the men for whom time should be up, theoretically, is her father, who has been accused by more than a dozen women of alleged sexual misconduct and was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault. Some of his accusers spoke out as recently as last month, renewing their allegations in light of the #MeToo movement.

Sheesh. Some people just can't take "yes" for an answer. Ivanka is not guilty of sexual harassment. But because of her father's questionable past, this somehow discredits her support? Where's the logic in that?

Some have pointed to this statement of "questionable" advice to women who may be sexually harassed.

Ivanka gave women some questionable advice for dealing with sexual harassment in her 2009 book, The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Business and in Life: “Learn to figure out when a hoot or a holler is indeed a form of harassment and when it’s merely a good-natured tease that you can give back in kind.”

Sounds like common sense to me. But then, I'm not a woman and don't get harassed. I'm sure some women are very uncomfortable having their sexiness and good looks commented on like that. I'm also sure that others enjoy the attention. Since most of us aren't mind readers and don't know what the reaction to a wolf whistle or catcall might be, good manners demand that we refrain from doing it.

Unless manners, too, are "sexist" in which case why should we care what women think anyway?